August 23, 2012

"And to a surprising degree, it is women — not men — who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future."

Well, this is, ostensibly, the justification for immigration, both legal and illegal. Americans in progressive numbers desire instant gratification, while failing to recognize their behavior is incompatible with evolutionary fitness. Still, the effort to normalize immigration, and illegal immigration specifically, only serves to preserve the illusion of a viable society. Perhaps we have evolved to become a single generation species.

To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind

Sure, when you pretend women are all in business school and your representation of the demographic are 5 people at Ivy League business-­school parties.

Seems backwards - the hookup culture is contingent on feminist progress, not the other way around. In other words, if college women still percieved a need for a male provider, they would still pursue monogamous relationships.

The "hook up culture" is wildly overstated. It certainly exists as a subculture, but just that.

What's interesting is that it's women who are talking about it, not men. Seems to me that they are trying to justify acting like whores by blaming cultural influence. It's the same lame excuses kids resort to with just about everything. And too many adults just buy into it, especially when it reinforces their particular belief system.

"Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them."

I am really amazed at how self-destructive people can be. Women, it's far, far better for you to find yourself a good man who can take care of you and marry him than almost anything else you can do, and men it's far far better for you to find such a woman and marry her than almost anything else you can do. Just doing this will improve your life as dramatically as quitting smoking, losing weight, excercising, and going to college all rolled up into one.

I've been out of college since 2002, so about 10 years (not counting law school). I went to a state school, not some ultra-conservative religious place or anything, and I would not say that there was a "hook-up culture" at all. There were people who "hooked up" (I don't think that we called it that, then), but it wasn't the norm and certainly wasn't expected or required. I met my husband the end of my freshman year, and never felt any pressure to date around once I was in a defined relationship with him, nor did I feel pressure to sleep with the fellows I was partying with before he came along.

Am I supposed to believe that things have changed that much, or is this whole unavoidable hook up culture thing overblown?

"A danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future."

AKA an actual "Daddy" for your kids.

No, they'll keep the owner of that wallet at arm's length, with the "help" of the state, until (as a friend of mine has finally accepted) he no longer cares if he ever sees his kid again. Just make the financial screwing end.

So your saying that Rush was right? That feminism was only propagated to allow ugly women access to men.

As far as marriage, progressives have ever been dismissive of anything that takes power away from the state. Who are you gonna' trust, Uncle Sugar, that delivers your welfare/baby fare/whatever fare check every 2 weeks, or the guy you fucked you for 5 minutes, and made you ugly and hurt for 9 months, saddled you with a kid, and never called, not even once?!

I've taken a number of writing classes in the Bay Area. The other students were mostly in their the 20s and 30s, with more women than men. Quite a lot of their stories, more than I expected, were based on their sexual experiences and their sexual experiences were based on the hookup culture.

It sounded plentiful and miserable. Even though I come from the so-called "Free Love" generation, I don't remember my peers having nearly so much sex except for some gays and musicians. I was struck that love was never mentioned in these stories. For the characters sex was about pleasure, status, and social maneuvering, and often resulted in painful complications. There was no sense of fun about it.

I also noticed the fierce contempt for men that appeared in the stories written by women, though the flipside never appeared in men's stories.

I don't know how closely their fiction matches current reality, but what I read startled me. It also didn't make for pleasant reading.

What a sterile, joyless future our daughters will inherit. Those who choose not to inhabit the hookup culture will still be beset by the men their more adventurous sisters attract, cast off and embitter.

The hookup culture, like the body image culture, seems a fraud foisted on women rather than a means of empowerment. How is it "empowering" if the guys now get (lots) more of what they want without any apparent expectations on the women's part?

They're manufacturing a perception in order to influence reality. It's not clear why they desire to sabotage the primary level of social organization established by the natural order. While I understand the personal desire to abrogate responsibility, it is the premise for a (literally) myopic vision of life. What's also interesting is that a subset of the same people (e.g. Schumer) who promote this outlook will, in private, recognize the inviolability of evolutionary principles and actively promote a superior behavior. They do recognize that behaviors are classified for normalization, tolerance, and rejection, and act accordingly, at least in private.

I did know one girl, a roommate, who got caught up in it, though. Again, not a culture, just a pattern that she fell into. She started with several back to back really intense relationships (as in, they met and were immediately claiming that they were soulmates and planning weddings) with increasingly emotionally disturbed guys. I guess when those petered out, and there wasn't another guy on the horizon, she started bringing them home and having "hookups", looking for another relationship or something, I don't know.

It was clearly a really tough time for her - she gained weight and was always sick, and just seemed unhappy. People definitely didn't applaud her or consider it normal, though - most of our friends were very concerned for her. She discussed it with me once and indicated that it was something that she felt really bad about, and that she really beleived that sex should be reserved for marriage.

(We've recently reconnected through facebook, and she seems to be much better now, thank goodness.)

" I was struck that love was never mentioned in these stories. For the characters sex was about pleasure, status, and social maneuvering, and often resulted in painful complications. There was no sense of fun about it."

Bet the stories sucked too.

(By the way there will be a backlash on this sooner or later but meanwhile they can always claim rape if they change their mind sometime during the night.)

Sad. Women have now lost the power to say "no". There was an article in Newsweek a few years ago about a club at Harvard of women who were wanted to abstain from sex and recognized that women had lost the power to say "no". I couldn't find that article but found this one instead-- http://cornellsun.com/node/29426 --but I liked this quote: "Magic aside, ever notice how attitudes toward sex are amplified tenfold in the media when students at elite colleges hold those attitudes?"

I cordially disagree with those who say a "hookup" culture is overstated.

I live in Iowa City, Iowa, the home of the University of Iowa, a state school with just under 30,000 students. I can tell you that, although there are probably plenty of modest, virtuous female students at U of Iowa, the vast majority of the ones I see around campus and downtown are vacuous trollops whose skimpy, immodest outfits an actual prostitute would be ashamed to wear in public.

In all seriousness, being constantly immersed in the University's culture and values, I can tell you that the hookup culture is indeed real. Perhaps not everywhere, and perhaps not to the same degree. But the college-age women I've observed are no longer looking for husbands or even long-term boyfriends. (And this is in Iowa, of all places.)

The hookup thing is a minority. Like always, the people having all the sex get all the attention.

It's another 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of the students are having eighty percent of the sex- with each other.

The rest are being boring and pursuing a degree.

With all this talk about hooking up and "game" and whatnot, it's important to remember that most people aren't doing any of it. Which is a good thing, after all, for the continued health of the society we live in.

The problem is when that twenty percent sets the tone for everyone else. People who are constantly in short-term relationships tend think the opposite gender is made up of a bunch of selfish jerks. Well, no, just the ones you are hooking up with. The internet is full of self-justifying gender nonsense that's best ignored.

Perhaps we should be a bit more skeptical about people who are "successful" in having relationships... as long as they don't last very long.

@John Lynch, I think that you are right; however, that really eats into the arguments presented several times in this article, that this culture is "unavoidable" and that females basically don't have a choice but to participate.

(On that note, did anyone really understand what the author's actual point of that article was? She said that females don't have a choice here several times, but seemed to conclude that this was ultimately a good thing. It was really disjointed, IMO.)

I also noticed the fierce contempt for men that appeared in the stories written by women, though the flipside never appeared in men's stories.

Probably because writing classes select against the type of man who would feel comfortable putting that in. There's plenty of misogyny arising out of the hookup culture, though. That's the whole "pick up artist" schtick: that they are successful at getting women into bed precisely because they despise them and see them for the creatures that they are. There are reams and reams of that stuff all over the internet.

For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

Hee...maybe they should look at the unemployment stats for recent college grads. But then again, math is hard....

John said..."I live in Iowa City, Iowa, the home of the University of Iowa, ..... the vast majority of the ones I see around campus and downtown are vacuous trollops whose skimpy, immodest outfits an actual prostitute would be ashamed to wear in public".

I have my first two degrees from the University of Michigan and as they say about the Big Ten, 9 out of 10 graduate as chaste virgins and the 10th goes to Iowa.

Seriously, don't you think that your gross generalization of sex crazed Iowa coeds is something out of Refer Madness?

Lindsay MeadowsWomen, it's far, far better for you to find yourself a good man who can take care of you and marry him than almost anything else you can do...."

Ahhh yes. Barefoot and endlessly pregnant. That's the ticket.

Do you really live in a world where, once a woman gets married, she loses all agency of her own and only can be "barefoot and pregnant?" How incredibly sad. And yet, how reflective of the modern liberal attitude towards women. I'll bet you call yourself a feminist while you hold such a low attitude towards women's ability to think for themselves, too.

(Ironically, as I sit here typing this, I actually am both barefoot and pregnant. But I chose that, after being married for 10+ years, and I'm doing so from my law office, with the law degree that I earned while married. (I like to kick off my shoes under the desk.)) :)

I know and talk with dozens of young women who are high school and college students. They're employees in bars and restaurants I frequent.

If you can believe the stories they tell, many are sexually active and relatively promiscuous. Almost all seem to hold the Clintonian view that anything other than vaginal intercourse is not 'real sex'. Girl/girl 'fun' is more common than I would have thought.

I don't see any hint of a feminist agenda among these young women - more like a "girls just wanna have fun' thing.

In all the movies and TV shows nowadays the woman rides the man. Does she want to be the man? She doesn't look happy when she's riding the man. Not in the shows. But she always has a very determined look on her face when she's riding the man. Like this is payback. Is it?

Barefoot and pregnant wasn't that bad. I miss it, now the children are older. Nothing but good memories. I have good memories of getting an education. I do miss work, wish the economy would pick up. For now just volunteer.

I guess it all depends on what your definition of a "promising future" is. If sleeping around with whomever happens to be available so you can avoid long term commitments and children for the hope of a higher income and getting further up the corporate ladder is a "promising future," so be it. I always had other things in mind, and still do.

David @1:57: Yeah, they did. Most of the writers were inexperienced, so that was part of it, but even if the stories had been better written they would have been unpleasant reading.

These writers did not have the knack of creating sympathetic characters. Worse, the women seemed to believe their protagonists were sympathetic, and maybe they were to other women, but to men, or at least me, they were horrors.

Probably because writing classes select against the type of man who would feel comfortable putting [contempt for women] in.

Balfegor @2:32: True! I know that most men have their angers toward women but generally they don't work that out in public or in mixed company. What's interesting is that women have no qualms about doing so in writing classes.

Male writers I know don't obssess so much on sex or the war between the sexes in their work.

And yes, there is the whole PUA (Pick-Up Artist) subculture, which is misogynist, but they keep those discussions to their enclaves.

What strikes me is the attitude that all of this hooking up...ok...call it what it is, whoring around and having meaningless sex, will somehow vanish and dissipate, as if it never happened. Then..suddenly, after callously treating the men in their lives like breathing sex toys, these girls (I don't dare call them women) believe that a prince charming will come along and treat them like a little princess.

Seriously? Don't they think that the men can tell that they are sluts? Why in the world should they marry YOU, when there are other women who didn't act like the town pump. Women who have legitimate respect and affection for their boyfriend/spouse and who don't look on men as a hooking up opportunity to get a better career or accumulate wealth.

I feel very sorry for these girls. They are going to wake up one day and find out that life has passed them by. Too old to have children. Disrespected and un-cherished. Finding out that perhaps their best opportunities had been casually tossed away and their best relationships treated like used toilet paper. Maybe a great career. But alone. So sad.

"The sexual culture may be more coarse these days, but young women are more than adequately equipped to handle it, because unlike the women in earlier ages, they have more-important things on their minds, such as good grades and intern­ships and job interviews and a financial future of their own."

LOLOLOLOLOL right, women never had anything to live for before some random afternoon in 1967. They never had anything "important" on their minds. Every woman who has ever lived who wasn't fixated on "good grades and internships and job interviews and a financial future of their own" was a total waste of flesh.

Do you really live in a world where, once a woman gets married, she loses all agency of her own and only can be "barefoot and pregnant?" How incredibly sad. And yet, how reflective of the modern liberal attitude towards women. I'll bet you call yourself a feminist while you hold such a low attitude towards women's ability to think for themselves, too.

(Ironically, as I sit here typing this, I actually am both barefoot and pregnant. But I chose that, after being married for 10+ years, and I'm doing so from my law office, with the law degree that I earned while married. (I like to kick off my shoes under the desk.)) :)

You tell her, sister! I am not pregnant, nor even barefoot, but I'm sitting in my home office in stocking feet (procrastinating on the review I'm supposed to be writing), which is close enough.

wv: 25 appickn. I'm assuming that's an address on the Appican Way, as spelled by an American.

For the most part they're delightful people who enjoy sex. Unless they're cheating, being abusive, spreading disease or hatching welfare babies, why not? Well, maybe if they were thinking about being the future Mrs Tebow :-)

...women never had anything to live for before some random afternoon in 1967

On that random afternoon in 1967, the children of the 60's decided that you were 'uptight' if you didn't share your body, whether man or woman (or rather boys and girls) with all comers.

Everything in life was free and sexual indulgence was and would always be consequence free. You had the condom and the pill and the IUD and the diaphragm to prevent the consequences - were you not too stoned or not too burnt out to use them right - and penicillin and abortion to mitigate the consequences if you were. But men (boys) had the one extra consequence mitigating advantage - they could walk away from a pregnancy.

And so sport fucking was born. Intercourse moved from the dual intent of procreation and joyous affirmation of lifelong companionship to scratching an itch.

And sport fucking beget feminism when women realized and resented that the established ways would bend but not break and the banker's son wasn't going to walk up the aisle with Willing Wanda, and that no matter how you sliced it, the man could always walk when your friend didn't visit on time. So fuck men - just not as often.

And feminism beget abortion as birth control because it her body and her life and sport fucking is just too much fun and pregnancy gets in the way and why should he be able to walk away and leave you with this inconvenient embryo.

My family economic background is no education but amazing money savers and incredible hard workers and as a result millionaires, but you could not tell my looking at them or how they live. My mom uses her Pig Points from her Pig Card everywhere.

I make tons of money but save shit. I have an elite education, but not because I wanted to marry money.

I did not marry for money, but eventually learned he was filthy rich. I didn't know he had money until like a year into the relationship. Hell, I thought his name was something other than his real name for like 6 months before he finally said my name is not Venkat. I didn't know his real name for 6 months and his money situation for a year.

We don't have as much sex as we used to, but I am ok with that.

I was initially more interested in his body than his money. Than I was interested in his brains. Now I like his brains and body and money.

I like the way he smells too. And the way he walks. And his smile. And his accent. And his dad. And his love for the rare clumber, even though he isn't really a dog person. And I really enjoy his spectacular, sculpted, defined, rock hard tits, amazing abs, huge shoulders, dynamic back, small ass, cute legs and quantity of hair on his body.

He doesn't know anything about American politics and we never talk about it and he doesn't give a shit.

We don't hang out with a group of friends and I like that. He has like 2 really close friends and I have like 5. But we have never met each other's friends. We just hang out together with the rare clumber.

Neither of us have had an abortion or been raped or raped someone. No interest in man/boy sex either. I want a big burly man.

The first few paragraphs were just too stupid to justify rtwt. It's amazing the spin that "progressive" thinkers can put on degradation. Sure, Ms. "End of Men" Rosin, those young women being treated with massive disrespect by their male peers and "boyfriends", with hearts already so hardened (or shriveled) that they they don't even seem to care that they're being pissed on - yeah, it's all good. But, we don't need no steenking self-respect or dignity when we've got "promising futures"!

Every morning, I wake up thinking that the sheer crazed full-of-shitness of our esteemed opinon-makers and public intellectuals had to have reached a limit yesterday...but every morning, I wake to find that they've managed to kick it up a notch one more time.

"Worse, the women seemed to believe their protagonists were sympathetic, and maybe they were to other women,..."

No, never.

The thing to do, if you're looking for a writing class, is be as certain as possible that the other people in it are there to learn how to write salable fiction and not there to coddle their precious creative impulses or because their friends don't want to hear their same boring stories anymore.

Hanna Rosen quotes one woman to the effect that if she's married by the time she's thirty, that will be fine.

Ah, has anyone pointed out to these young women that (1) women make up approximately 60% of the graduation classes, so therefore (2) there are three college-educated women for every two college-educated men. Now figure out how many of those men have technical or business degrees, or will make it into med or law school, and it follows that (3) the competition for a desirable husband will be about five to one.

Consequently (4) the woman Hanna interviews will get to age 27 or 28 and start lamenting that "all the good ones are taken."

"such as good grades and intern­ships and job interviews and a financial future of their own."

"Those are the important things? It's nice to pick the easy stuff and call it important."

Yeah. The hard part is relationships, not school or internships or interviews or a job or career. First you have to pick a good person, someone you genuinely like and respect, and you probably need to do this when you're young and stupid. And then you need to maintain that relationship over good and bad times, when you're in a crappy, pre-menstral or paranoid mood, paying bills and cleaning toilets.

From what I've seen, many women writers think that making a character a viewpoint character automatically makes her a protagonist. So then they write the viewpoint character doing all the selfish things the writer has done in their life or wishes they would have done, and yet still everything turns out great and the woman is loved and desired by all men just for her existence.

So then they write the viewpoint character doing all the selfish things the writer has done in their life or wishes they would have done, and yet still everything turns out great and the woman is loved and desired by all men just for her existence.

I've noticed something similar in action shows like 24 and Burn Notice.

The hero is protecting an attractive woman as they are being attacked by the bad guys. So they are dodging bullets, explosions and whatnot, but as he leads her he is also exquisitely sensitive to her emotional needs. He apologizes for his brusqueness or deflects with self-deprecating humor.

We've seen similar repartee with heroes like Indiana Jones, but what gets me in the current crop is that the male switches back and forth from Navy-SEAL-mode to therapist-friend-lover-father-figure within split seconds in the middle of the action.

"I did get the impression that the women often were on the same wavelength. (In some cases they showed up in class as friends.) Plus the women were very good at giving positive feedback to each other."

The women might be very good at giving positive feedback to each other, but what's the value of positive feedback?

They were doing a *social* thing.

You were writing.

It's great to have someone say "this is good" because you don't want to fix something that wasn't broken, but it's not actually useful otherwise.

I have no doubt the hook-up culture is real, but I have a feeling that the media has amplified it. In general the media tends to take subculture and make it culture. It's why when we see television and movies about college in the 60s, every single person seems to be a free-love hippie, even though they were a minority. You've got a lot of boundary cases, where people adopt the look but not the behavior of subcultures, and it makes the subculture look more prevalent than it actually is.

For what it is worth, not much I suppose, my experience tells me otherwise. I went to a top undergraduate college, and the most successful women I have known were professors and graduate students at this institution. Almost all of them were in long term, serious relationships.

Change always occurs at the margins of society. Ivy League and hook-up culture are the margins, not the central core.

One could just as easily write about those young people who live virtuous lives of chastity and fidelity, but the leftists in positions of power in the media are largely naive nihilists or anarchists willing to promote anything that upsets traditions for the sake of novelty.

I would love to see an honest article from a young man about his perspective on the hookup culture and feminism. Prediction: All these willing sluts are good for now, but I'd never want to marry one.

@TraditionalGuy I for one think that ladies who use male fuck buddies for sex and then throw them away are cruel.

I can see that now, at 40 something with kids and a great wife.

When I was in college, a woman who wanted unattached sex would have been (and was, a few times) a wonder and delight.

I had stuff to do, and surely was not looking for a mate for life. It was not really possible to be 'thrown away'. These were the only college 'relationships' that made sense to some of us, male and female alike, and by flowing with it, some of these people are still dear friends.

Note that in the old days, the huge falloff in attractiveness that women see after the age of 30, was masked by the institution of marriage. It allowed a woman to become matronly...

But now, a hookup culture exposes this steep cliff very visibly.

Women over 35 who think they can be 'cougars', now abound. In reality, pickup artists instruct newbies to use cougars for practice, and then moving on to the younger women that the pickup artist actually wants.

Personal and societal decline is a feature, not a bug, of the Liberal Operating System.

The most innocent explanation of the trail of destruction following after the liberal arrival is the Typhoid Marry one. They mean well, but nothing, and I mean not one thing, can cause them to ever doubt their prescriptions aren't working. Either they are malicious or criminally negligent. The deade-enders that remain on the Left are self-selected to be the most immune from facts or most determined to continue the destruction.